Every once in a while, I decide to give the mainstream print media another chance to impress me. And every single time this experiment ends five minutes after it begins with me hurling the newspaper or magazine at the wall in annoyance.
Today this happened again. I thought it would make sense to read the November issue of Harper’s Magazine because the cover looked interesting. Of course, as early as page five, I discovered two very stupid statements. In the very first one, a journalist is trying to convince himself that he is more relevant to the reading public than bloggers:
While bloggers and tweeters are important, they simply do not have the resources to compete with a newspaper.
This guy must have fallen asleep twenty years ago and has just awakened to regale us all with this idiocy. Hopefully, he will be going back to sleep right after this. Of course, only a rare individual blogger can compete with a newspaper. Collectively, however, bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers and Co are a huge force. More and more people trust us over the intensely corrupt and inane NYTimes and WashPo. If you don;t agree, the please tell me, when was the last time that one of these newspapers surprised you or made you think?
But wait, this is nothing compared to what I read immediately after. One of the magazine’s readers sent in the following comment about Barack Obama that the magazine considered important enough to publish:
This son of a single mother [Obama] learned a woman’s way of negotiating – a fundamentally cooperative approach dependent upon good faith, without posturing or making strict demands.
I find these stupid patriarchal stereotypes kind of scary when they are delivered with this single-minded, unthinking earnestness. If you think the author of this bizarrely stupid and offensive statement is some silly teenager, think again. This comes from a Professor Emerita at UCLA. We all know that UCLA has gone down the drain but who could have guessed things were that bad?
Well, I guess Harper’s fulfilled its objective of keeping me informed. It revealed to me that print media are even more hopeless than I thought and that UCLA has become a very weird place.
Clarissa's Blog 
I thought that I had seen it all when I saw the article in US news and report yesterday talking about Obama engineering the path of Hurricane Sandy into New York to enhance his chances of re-election but today I discovered a piece in The Telegraph explaining how the Japanese are increasing their use of umbrellas to protect them from Fukushima radiation fallout.
“Fear of fall-out from last year’s nuclear accident means Tokyo residents hate getting caught in the rain – but they’ve got no problem eating Fukushima fruit, says British expat Alastair Wanklyn. ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatlife/9625856/Radiation-fearing-Tokyoites-weapon-of-choice-The-umbrella.html
How about a little fact checking but then mass media is all about entertainment.
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